I think the most important part of it is the idea of having a second (beyond the standard lib that comes with the runtime) larger, optional layer of curated libs that are known to work together. That together with the metapackage idea for easy inclusion ( maybe with possible overrides as in the Rust proposal) would be very handy for people who do not do Julia coding all the time and hence cannot follow the larger package ecosystem closely. People who do not want this second layer could still just use the standard lib + whatever packages they want. One could even extend this to multiple layer, each one more optional and lighter curated: standard lib -> platform light -> extended paltform -> ...
Now there is already a good attempt in the julia ecosystem to group related packages in webpages and try to avoid too much libraries that do the same or partially overlap (more like scientific Python, rather than the R jungle) and that's great, but per group there still are several competing packages and sometimes it's unclear from the descriptions to pick a clear winner. A curated subset of these "the platform" by the community that adrresses the most common needs except maybe for special niches, would be very helpful. That's all :) On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 4:33:24 PM UTC+2, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > There's a fair amount of discussion of the Rust Platform proposal over > here: > > https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/proposal-the-rust-platform/3745 > > In short there's a lack of agreement to this in Rust. Moreover, in Rust, > different versions of libraries are much more closely locked to each other, > whereas in Julia the coupling is much looser. Steven, since you're in favor > of this idea, can you explain why you think it's a good idea for Julia? > What problems does it solve? > > On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 7:31 AM, Tony Kelman <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> The vision I personally have for this would be something more like SUSE >> Studio (https://susestudio.com/) where it's just a few clicks, or a >> configuration file in the build system, that could give you a set of >> default-installed packages of your choosing, and make installers for your >> own custom "spins" of a Julia-with-packages distribution. >> >> >> >> On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 2:08:06 AM UTC-7, Tim Holy wrote: >>> >>> module MyMetaPackage >>> >>> using Reexport >>> >>> @reexport using PackageA >>> @reexport using PackageB >>> ... >>> >>> end >>> >>> Best. >>> --Tim >>> >>> On Monday, August 1, 2016 1:48:47 AM CDT Steven Sagaert wrote: >>> > is more than just a webpage with a list of packages... for starters >>> the >>> > concept of metapackage. >>> > >>> > On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 10:25:33 AM UTC+2, Tamas Papp wrote: >>> > > Maybe you already know about it, but there is a curated list of >>> packages >>> > > at https://github.com/svaksha/Julia.jl >>> > > >>> > > On Mon, Aug 01 2016, Steven Sagaert wrote: >>> > > > see https://aturon.github.io/blog/2016/07/27/rust-platform/ >>> >>> >>> >
